The Speed Traders Workshop 2015 Kuala Lumpur, “How Banks, Hedge and Mutual Funds and Brokers Battle Markets ‘RIGGED’ by Wall Street’s ‘Flash Boys’, High-frequency Trading, Exchanges and Dark Pools” (http://thespeedtradersworkshop.com), is the first and most comprehensive initiation to the world of high-frequency trading with Edgar Perez, author of Knightmare on Wall Street (http://knightmareonwallstreet.com), and will open the door to the secretive world of computerized low-latency trading, the most controversial form of investing today; in the name of protecting the algorithms they have spent so much time perfecting, speed traders almost never talk to the press and try to disclose as little as possible about how they operate.

The Speed Traders Workshop 2015 Kuala Lumpur covers the latest research currently available and reveals how high-frequency trading players are operating in global markets and driving the development of electronic trading at breakneck speeds from the U.S. and Europe to Japan, India, and Brazil. The “flash crash”, the suspended BATS IPO, the botched Facebook IPO, Knight Capital’s trading malfunction and NASDAQ’s Flash Freeze are just a few of the milestones in the history of high-frequency trading that will be dissected with participants.

ABOUT EDGAR PEREZ

Mr. Perez is the author of Knightmare on Wall Street, The Rise and Fall of Knight Capital and the Biggest Risk for Financial Markets (2013), and The Speed Traders, An Insider’s Look at the New High-Frequency Trading Phenomenon That is Transforming the Investing World, published in English by McGraw-Hill Inc. (2011), 交易快手, published in Mandarin by China Financial Publishing House (2012), and Investasi Super Kilat, published in Bahasa Indonesia by Kompas Gramedia (2012).

Mr. Perez was a vice president at Citigroup, a senior consultant at IBM, and a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Co. in New York City. Previously, he managed Operations and Technology for Peruval Finance. Mr. Perez has an undergraduate degree in Systems Engineering from Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería, Lima, Peru (1994), a Master of Administration from Universidad ESAN, Lima, Peru (1997) and a Master of Business Administration from Columbia Business School, New York, with a dual major in Finance and Management (2002). He belongs to the Beta Gamma Sigma honor society. Mr. Perez resides in the New York City area with his wife Olga, son Edgar Felipe and daughter Svetlana Sofia.

According to New York Times, the computer breach at JPMorgan Chase this summer — the largest intrusion of an American bank to date — might have been thwarted if the bank had installed a simple security fix to an overlooked server in its vast network, said people who have been briefed on internal and outside investigations into the attack.

Big corporations like JPMorgan spend millions — $250 million in the bank’s case — on computer security every year to guard against increasingly sophisticated attacks like the one on Sony Pictures. But the weak spot at JPMorgan appears to have been a very basic one, the people said. They did not want to be identified publicly because the investigation into the attack is incomplete.

The attack against the bank began last spring, after hackers stole the login credentials for a JPMorgan employee, these people said. Still, the attack could have been stopped there.

According to New York Times, at a critical moment in Michael Mann’s cyberthriller, “Blackhat,” a naïve security guard slips a young woman’s thumb drive into his corporate computer.

The camera lingers on the drive’s all-uppercase brand name: SONY. A few covert keystrokes later, the system is penetrated — one hacker, a good guy, is within reach of an illicit fortune stolen by another.

If this is not exactly cinematic art imitating life, the release of “Blackhat” by Universal Pictures next month will at least show spooky synchronicity with the very real hacking attack on Universal’s crosstown competitor, Sony Pictures. Set to open on Jan. 16, Mr. Mann’s movie is one of the most authentic film treatments of malicious hacking in memory — and it has been given added cultural urgency by inadvertently crossing paths with the Sony assault.

Check Point Software Technologies recently revealed a flaw in millions of routers that allows the devices to be controlled by hackers.

The company’s Malware and Vulnerability Group detected 12 million Internet-connected devices that have the flaw.

The vulnerability, which Check Point dubbed “Misfortune Cookie,” can be found in the code of a commonly used embedded Web server, RomPager from AllegroSoft. A system attacker can exploit it to take control of a router and use it to steal data from both wired and wireless devices connected to a network.

Fixes for the flaw have been available since 2005, but 98 percent of the devices using RomPager haven’t been updated and still contain the vulnerable version of the software.

CYBER-SECURITY is now part of all our lives. “Patches” and other security updates arrive for phones, tablets and PCs. Consultants remind us all not to open unknown files or plug unfamiliar memory sticks into our computers. The bosses of some Western firms throw away phones and laptops after they have been to China assuming they have been hacked. And yet, as our special report this week points out, digital walls keep on being breached. Last year more than 800m digital records, such as credit- and debit-card details, were pinched or lost, more than three times as many as in 2012. According to a recent estimate by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank, the cost to the global economy of cybercrime and online industrial espionage stands at $445 billion a year—about as much as the GDP of Austria.

Now a new phase in this contest is emerging: “the internet of things”. This involves embedding miniature computers in objects and connecting them to the internet using wireless technology. Cisco, a technology company, predicts that 50 billion connected devices will be in circulation by the end of the decade, up from 11 billion last year. Web-connected cars and smart appliances in homes are becoming more common, as are medical devices that can be monitored by doctors many miles from their patients. Tech companies are splurging cash: witness Google’s punt on driverless cars and the $3.2 billion it has spent buying Nest, a maker of smart thermostats.